One influential thinker. One contemporary who has walked the same ground. Two parts, no hurry.
This series was inspired by the Australian entrepreneur Evan Thornley, and by the answer he gives when he is asked what he wants to leave behind. Judaism has a word for it, mesorah: the handing on of received wisdom from one generation to the next, an unbroken chain across a hundred generations by people who understood that what they were given was never theirs to keep. Thornley chose Judaism as an adult and has read everything Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, and he applies the idea well outside religion, to companies, to institutions, to the way a person takes their leave. Legacy, he says, is not a monument. It is transmission.
You have received the wisdom of those who came before you. Your central responsibility is to play your role in the continuation of that transmission. Evan Thornley
The record, not the feed.
We only record people who built something, and only once they have stopped protecting it.
A new kind of interview. Recorded once, kept for good. Transmission.
The pairing is the point
Anyone can book a good guest. Transmission books a great guest and the one person equipped to properly interrogate them, someone from the same generation, the same industry, or the same set of scars. Not a journalist. Not a fan. A contemporary.
It is why the answers are different: a stranger gets the prepared version, a peer gets the real one.
Two days, two parts
Part one is the work: the argument, the evidence, what they built and why. Part two is the person: what they believe, who formed them, what they think is worth handing on. Guests are told the shape in advance, which is why the second day is always better than the first.
Let the answers run
A four-minute uninterrupted answer is an asset, not a problem. Episodes are cut for filler, never for length, and chaptered afterwards from what actually happened rather than from a plan.
Why it is called Transmission
Asked about legacy, the first guest said the word he kept returning to came from a three-thousand-year-old tradition: you receive the wisdom of those who came before you, and your responsibility is to play your part in passing it on.
Season One, Evan Thornley
Evan Thornley built LookSmart into the first Australian technology company listed on the NASDAQ, tried to buy Google when it was still in a garage, sat in the Victorian Parliament, ran Better Place, helped rescue Australia's largest childcare network out of receivership, and now runs the housing business LongView. He recorded these conversations knowing they would be among his last. He has a terminal illness, and chose to spend some of his remaining time putting this on the record. He would rather you argued with the ideas.
Dirt Does The Work
Land appreciates. Buildings depreciate. The land under Australia's existing suburban homes gains roughly $800 billion in value every year, and he argues that not one company has built a business model around it. Two and a half hours on where the money in a system actually sits, what trust is when you stop using it as a marketing word, and why banking, real estate and politics have all been solving the wrong problem for 150 years.
Chapters
- 00:45Two generations of the internet
- 03:01A Paleolithic species running medieval institutions
- 13:29Is banking broken?
- 16:24Defining trust: mutual obligation, promises kept
- 19:38Dignified, secure housing
- 33:24Why Australia is the worst place to rent
- 36:16Knowing when to fold: quitting McKinsey
- 45:44The Google that got away
- 56:00$800 billion a year: the dirt does the work
- 1:29:25“I have a shocking admission. I am a populist.”
- 1:49:09A hotel with no late checkout
- 2:18:32Seven valuations, one house
Teach Your Children Well
Day two, in a house full of family and books. Why trust is never abstract and always interpersonal. What makes an institution outlast the people who built it. The two English teachers who turned a poor kid from the Central Coast into someone who duxed the subject. GoodStart, GetUp, being politically homeless, and the dream dinner with Jonathan Sacks and Christopher Lasch. It ends with what he intends to do with the time he has left.
Chapters
- 01:51A firebombed synagogue, 800 metres away
- 04:12Is this the worst of times?
- 08:32Legacy, starting with the children in the next room
- 11:57Trust is always interpersonal
- 14:42“I won’t be here to cash that cheque”
- 22:38How to build an institution that lasts
- 29:33Criticism without building achieves nothing
- 32:07AI: productivity tool and hallucinogen
- 38:15The two teachers who changed everything
- 43:21GetUp, a wayward child
- 57:05GoodStart: rescuing the world’s largest childcare network
- 1:05:18The dream dinner with Sacks and Lasch
- 1:23:54What he would actually fund
In his words
Land appreciates, buildings depreciate. The dirt does the work.
It’s easy to make promises. It’s hard to keep promises.
The easiest thing in the world is to criticise. The hard thing is to build.
AI is an unbelievable productivity tool for people who already know what they are doing, and it is a hallucinogenic drug for people who don’t.
There is no such thing really as trust that is not interpersonal.
I’ve just been checked into a hotel where there is no late checkout.
Who is talking
Evan Thornley
Grew up on the New South Wales Central Coast, poor enough that he is fifteen centimetres shorter than his father. A scholarship took him to Scotch College for his last two years of school; he duxed English. After four years at McKinsey he saw a web browser for the first time and quit weeks later, six weeks after his twins were born, to co-found LookSmart. Since then: the Victorian Parliament, Better Place, GetUp, Per Capita, the GoodStart childcare rescue, and LongView.
Nigel Dalton
Came to Australia from New Zealand for the National Mutual Life Association and never left. A social scientist by training and a technologist by trade, he has spent three decades at the intersection of technology and Australian industry, as Chief Information Officer of REA Group and founder of REA Labs, and earlier at Lonely Planet, in the years when the company was still arguing about whether it was ethical to put advertising on a website.